Ever have the need to keep track of players in a Node.js based game? Maybe you were building a turn-based game and you had a few servers running and you needed some distributed and atomic solution backed with Redis? Well, if this teeny tiny subset of developer need overlaps with yours then today is your… Read more »

This week I’m guest blogging on my friends website, Code Planet! In particular I wrote a five part article (6,000 words!) on what I learned while developing my recent game, Strategic Game of Life. Check it out here: What I learned while publishing an HTML5 Mobile App

Play It Strategic Game of Life on Google Play Strategic Game of Life on Firefox Marketplace Strategic Game of Life Web (play it on anything) Strategic Game of Life on iOS App Store Strategic Game of Life on Amazon Appstore Strategic Game of Life Classic (2013, desktop only) A Simple Port Strategic Game of Life: Mobile… Read more »

It’s been a while since my last Linode upgrade (about five months judging by the uptime-o-meter). This upgrade took about fifteen minutes and from what I can tell resulted in no side effects. While the last upgrade came with about 60% increase in throughput, this upgrade was closer to 16%. Take it with a grain… Read more »

This is a comparison of different methods for performing asynchronous control flow in JavaScript, specifically Callbacks, Promises, Generators / Yields (ES6), and Async / Await (ES7). To follow along be sure you understand how the JavaScript Event Loop works and what it means when code is executed synchronously in the current stack, or shoved into the queue to… Read more »

There are a myriad of native mobile game engines available today, JavaScript will never be as fast as a game running compiled code, and simply running a game in a browser provides a lackluster user experience. That said HTML5 is still a powerful and free platform that you may already be proficient in, and if written correctly, HTML5/JS can be more than adequate for many… Read more »

I’ve been awake for over 24 hours developing at the Beta Breakers Gamejam. Here’s my entry: Play Gridloche (browser) Challenge Post (entry) It’s a multiplayer game where many players can join simultaneously. New characters are made available to all players at the same interval. Drag and drop a character from the inventory at the bottom of the… Read more »

I’ve been happily hosting my various PHP/nginx websites and occasional crazy Node.js application on a Linode 1024 VPS for the last couple years. Recently I’ve been looking into AWS and other VPS/PaaS providers for side projects and figured I should check out what I was getting from my Linode. Interesting. Apparently I haven’t upgraded or… Read more »

This weekend I put together Robot Onslaught. There’s no server tech involved (save for simple serving of the files). All data is sent over PubNub. Play Robot Onslaught Robot Onslaught on GitHub Move around with WASD. Shoot in different directions using the Arrow Keys (I map them to a USB SNES controller for extra awesomeness)…. Read more »